Sunday, September 7, 2014

Large Independent Restaurant Operator Leveraging Learning Processes

Starting
simple and leveraging an intelligent process management system, this
organization was able to grow a rich process portfolio gleaning benefits of
various types in short period of time. It is now poised to attempt larger
scoped process projects.

Emerging Set of Challenges:

At
the beginning this organization just wanted to implement solution just to
manage incoming paper mails. It was important to control receiving documents,
passing them to recipients and acknowledging receipt. This humble beginning enabled by agile
methods and an auto-optimizing capability grew to a larger portfolio of
processes because of the ease of development, operation and optimization.

Solution:

It soon became more important to select the right process project
rather than concentrate on the implementation.
The organization was quoted “In the past IT projects we
were involving a board member or head of department as a project’s business owner.
But now we changed our
approach. We want end users to become project’s business owners. It is much better approach because they know exactly their processes and
can describe them very quickly. Management board is also supports this approach
because doesn’t involve them so much in projects.” This organization decided to spend 80 % the time
on choosing the right process, and only 20 % on its implementation.

Benefits:

There were significant savings in developing
process projects. The goal was
to shorten time-to-market and deliver new process to business users as soon as
possible. “Using previous solutions it
was taking up to 5-6 months to deliver new process – starting with process
analysis, purchasing consulting services, implementation and deployment. And
sometimes afterwards we had to change it anyway. It was too long.”New system shortened it from few months to few days. “For example creating a workflow process for
submit and accept new projects took just 3 days. Then we moved it to production environment. We also implemented for legal department a process for gathering
opinions and accepting agreements. It took one week.”There are plans to implement around 50 processes including complex
process of opening new restaurant, which involves most departments in the
company.

It
is very important that new process can be very quickly implemented without
costly process analysis. It can be done in one meeting in 2 to 4 hours.
Business users can start using it immediately and observe how it works in
practice. The process platform shows them real flows and finds bottlenecks.
Users can very quickly analyse how to improve and optimize their process.

Net; Net:

BPM technologies are easier to use than traditional
development, but when combined with auto-optimization, leveraging a form of
artificial intelligence, the maturity cycle of the process accelerates as the
business professionals learn.